When buying links, it is often mentioned in this forum that one needs to look the OBL coming from that page of that directory. What does that mean? For instance, shopping category - jewelry. Is that the total URLs already listed in there in jewelry category - you count this as OBL? It's not clear. Can someone explain in detail? Query from Newbie.
A page with more than 20-30 outbound links is really pushing it...especially if its below a PR4. Having too many outbound links dilutes the value of the page rank.
You actually want to look at the link ratio: there should be more incoming links to that page where you're going to be listed than outgoing links (more incoming than outbound). It also helps if there are jewelry-relate links from other sites to the page where your site is going to be listed. Furthermore, look at the sites that are already listed and see if the links are counting (do the links from that directory to the sites already listed show up in Yahoo!?)
That is important but isn't always the case. You can have a links page with absolutely no incoming links (besides for the internal links) and have a high PR. That page will still pass on a good amount of rank to your site. But I agree, one should also look at incoming/outgoing.
A directory has 50 jewelery urls listed and B directory has 200 urls listed, so which one is better, A or B? And why?
all things equal, directory A is better because there are fewer outbound links on the page. Also, Google recommends that you keep less than 100 links on a page. Will this prevent your site from being indexed? Probably not. Regardless, you should never, EVER pay a single penny to be listed on any page that has more than 50 outbound links (for PR purposes that is) and is not an authority site with some serious links (Yahoo and DMOZ, for instance, are a different story). I'm sure people will now chime in and tell me that I am wrong...that's fine. We all have our ways...I stick by what has worked for me and I am content (more or less).